Permanent Affordable Housing: Mixed Populations

Comunilife operates affordable, comfortable and secure housing that provides residents with a range of on-site services. Tenants are a mix of very low-income community residents and people with special needs.

Prospect Residence – a 60-unit, South Bronx-based “green residence” that opened in October 2011 with funding from the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) for low-income, older adults. Thirty-five of Prospect Residence’s tenants are special needs and 25 are seniors from the community. All residents live in studio apartments and have access to the building’s communal spaces – including a dining room, patio, balcony and planting garden.

Three Bronx-based apartment houses provide 242 units – from studios to two-bedroom apartments – for very low-income individuals and families. One quarter of the apartments are set aside for people with special needs.

With a total of 100 apartments, Comunilife’s two permanent supportive housing residences –Dona Rosita I, in the South Bronx,and Dona Rosita II, in Brooklyn – serve formerly homeless New Yorkers living with special needs. The program offers residents a combination of safe, secure housing; comprehensive, culturally-competent, on-site services; and a true feeling of community. As a result, a full 65% of these formerly homeless and acutely fragile adults have remained stably housed for more than ten years; 15% eventually leave the program to live independently in the community.In 2010, Dona Rosita II received the Supportive Housing Network of New York’s “Residence of the Year” award.

El Rio Residence – a 65 unit building in the Bronx’s West Farm neighborhood provides 39 studio apartments for adults living with special needs and 29 low-income New Yorkers.

Comunilife's mission is to improve the quality of life and create a healthier tomorrow for New Yorkers with special needs in the Hispanic and broader communities - by providing culturally competent health and human services and a continuum of affordable and supportive housing.